Blcoking Analytics Spam Referral Traffic

[wearehappymedia]

Hello,

I'm starting to find some of our sites being heavily affected by spam referral traffic.

I've been doing a bit of research, but it seems advice is changing all the time (or trying to sell me a service)

Does anyone have any suggestions (or links to point me to) on the best way to block spam referral traffic (All our sites are Wordpress).

Is there a way of blocking from past data or only future?

Will blocking affect past moz data or is that permanently contaminated?

I really don't quite understand what is in it for these spammers.

Any advice greatly appreciated

[ChrisAshton]

Hi Radi,

The best way I've found to do this is via Google Analytics spam filters. Sadly for me I haven't had a chance to properly document my process for doing this but this post from Megalytic seems to cover it pretty well.

This method does a great job of filtering out the spam in your Analytics data, the obvious drawback here being that it doesn't extend beyond Google Analytics. Since most tools (that we use anyway) that provide traffic data pull from Analytics, this rarely causes a problem, just something to be aware of.

The other factor that I didn't consider when I first tested this method is that creating a new view gives you a clean slate; you're not going to see historic data in that filtered view. When you create that new view, you'll see 0 visits and data will only start to accumulate from that point forward.

You could apply the filter to your existing view but that leaves you with no "control" account if you ever need to do any troubleshooting or comparison so in my opinion, it's worth starting with that clean slate and if you're in an agency environment, just clearly communicate expectations with the client so there are no unwelcome surprises in the coming weeks.

I hope that helps!

[TimHolmes]

There are a couple of methods to help reduce any ghost/referral spam you may be getting, one is to use your htaccess, (this reduces crawled traffic only) and the other is to set up filters in GA.

This post from Carlos Escalera, is one of my favourites. https://moz.com/blog/stop-ghost-spam-in-google-analytics-with-one-filter

Hope this helps.